The connection worked fine the other day and for some reason is doesn't. MySQL is running in Ubuntu Server 12.04 and I am trying to connect to a database using ODBC Connector 5.1 from Windows 7.

I have tried commenting out and keeping the bind-address in the cnf file. I have tried to grant all access. I have been reading endless amounts of tutorials and posting to attempt to figure it out. I cannot figure out what is going on, also I am a newbie to all this and I have noticed that most posting leave out some minor things that others may be attuned to.

Help! Thanks in advance.

The service is running and I get the following from netstat -tlpen | grep mysql:

Without any further info, that would be hard to answer. You need to tell us the output of netstat -tlpen, the one of iptables -L and what is the error message you get when trying to establish the ODBC connection. That will be a good start already, further info would probably still be needed!
– HuygensMar 3 '13 at 16:34

I added to my original question with the things you mentioned.
– LandArchMar 3 '13 at 20:30

So from a network point of view, it looks alright. Now it is about the user accounts, how did you configure the user account you are using for the ODBC connection? Or about security policies, have you check if you are using AppArmor? Check if you have something denied as reported by AppArmor in either audit.log, syslog or messages (files that you can find under /var/log)
– HuygensMar 3 '13 at 21:01

AppArmor is not installed from what I can tell. I followed the white paper developed by the program that I am trying to connect. It is accessible from landfx.com/documentation/…. I commented out the bind address in my.cnf, I have also tried it with 0.0.0.0 and the servers ip.
– LandArchMar 4 '13 at 13:14

Could you tell us the exact error message ODBC Connector is returning and could you activate the logs in MySQL and see if it reports any error while connecting? You can check this answer how to configure MySQL logging: serverfault.com/a/253688/67419
– HuygensMar 5 '13 at 9:49

I finally figured out what was going on. It turns out that the static ip that I set for my server was not completely establishedand upon reboot another computer on my LAN grabbed the ip address that I dictated for the server.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

and changed the information similar to this tutorial, using the information realted to my LAN.

Instead of changing the resolv.conf file as the tutorial states I added:

dns-nameserver XX.XX.XX.XX
dns-nameserver XX.XX.XX.XX

as two additional lines at the bottom of the interfaces file. XX.XX.XX.XX are replaced with the dns-nameservers that I identified from my router. Other information that I read indicates that you could use others, i.e. Google or OpenDNS. Once that was done and the network was restarted, I had to remove dhcp-client from the server. Without doing this the static ip address does not maintain upon restarting the server.